THE EUROPEAN Union and America have reached a deal on data protection. The “EU-US Privacy Shield” allows companies to store Europeans’ personal data on American computers. This ends a three-month hiatus since the European Court of Justice struck down the previous agreement, “Safe Harbour”, on the grounds that it gave insufficient protection against snooping by American spy agencies. Failure to reach a deal could have sparked a damaging legal spat, in which some European national data protection agencies could have ruled illegal all transfers of data across the Atlantic.
